At the present we are only talking about biopsies, or dealing with dead patients. A safe way to start, but scientists at the Duke University in North Carolina have already seen these robots achieve a 93% success rate when cutting into prostate tissue. A dead turkey, whose flesh has a similar texture to humans, was used in the experiments. The robotic arms used ultrasound to locate the exact placement of the organs, and then took real-time 3D information which told them what to do next.
The leader of the team, Professor Stephen Smith, explained that the next test they will undertake is to try out the arm on a human mannequin. This dummy will have a “stiff bra cup” with a grape embedded inside, to mimic a cancerous lesion. The robot’s job will be to remove this lesion while following correct medical procedure and saving the person’s life (theoretically). One of the main problems that will need to be addressed is improving the robots’ speed when it comes to obtaining and processing the data from the ultrasounds, but a more powerful processor and a more effective algorithm can help overcome this challenge.
The professor is hopeful that success in these tests will pave the way for a lot more robots doing surgeries on their own, not just biopsies. This would save patients time and money, which is one of the biggest problems in the healthcare industry today. Hopefully, they’ll be able to offer some type of medical guarantee as well.
A brief video showing a medical robot undergoing trials follows.
[source]
SmartMachines
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On the evening of Saturday, August 14th, join us for exciting discussions with Summit Speakers at a cocktail reception hosted by the Singularity Institute. This event will feature the opportunity to meet with speakers at the 2010 Singularity Summit, the world’s premier conference on the technological Singularity, held in San Francisco on August 14th and 15th. The meeting will be held at the Infinity Towers in San Francisco. Tickets are limited to 70. For more information, contact Singularity Institute COO Amy Willey at amywilley@singinst.org. Register today!
The 2010 ICDM Workshop on Domain Driven Data Mining
URL: [link]
In conjunction with the 2010 IEEE International Conference on
Data Mining (ICDM 2010)
Sydney, Australia, December 14-17, 2010
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The Singularity Summit 2010 is almost here! The full schedule has been posted on the website. Here it is:
Day 1: The Future of Human Evolution
8:00 AM - 9:00 Registration starts. Breakfast served outside the hotel by Boudin
9:00 - 9:05 Sean McCabe: Introduction
9:05 - 9:40 Michael Vassar: The Darwinian Method
9:45 - 10:25 Gregory Stock: Evolution of Post-Human Intelligence
10:25 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:00 Ray Kurzweil: The Mind and How to Build One
12:05PM - 12:40 Ben Goertzel: AI Against Aging
12:40 - 2:10 Lunch: Served by Boudin Outside the Hotel
2:10 - 2:45 Steven Mann: Extending Ourselves with Technology
2:50 - 3:20 Mandayam Srinivasan: Replacing Our Bodies
3:25 - 4:10 Brian Litt: The Past, Present and Future of Brain Machine Interface
4:15 - 4:45 Demis Hassabis: Machine Learning is Rapidly Discovering How the Brain Works
4:50 - 5:15 Coffee Break
5:20 - 5:45 Terry Sejnowski: Reverse-Engineering Brains is Within Reach
5:50 - 6:15 Dennis Bray: What Cells Can Do That Robots Can’t
6:15 - 7:00 Sejnowski/Bray Debate: Will We Soon Realistically Emulate Biological Systems?
7:00 PM Closing
Day 2: Why and How We Should Solve the World’s Problems
9:00AM - 9:35 Eliezer Yudkowsky: Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism
9:40 - 10:15 Ramez Naam: The Digital Biome
10:15 - 10:40 Coffee & Bagels served by Boudin (see directions and map)
10:40 - 11:10 Lance Becker: Modifying the Boundary Between Life and Death
11:15 - 11:45 Ellen Heber-Katz: The MRL Mouse - How It Regenerates and How We Might Do the Same
11:50 - 12:35 Anita Goel: Rapid Diagnostics and Sensing with Nanofluidics
12:35PM - 2:00 Lunch Served by Boudin outside the hotel (see the map)
2:00 - 2:35 Shane Legg: Universal Measures of Intelligence
2:40 - 3:15 John Tooby: General Intelligence and Narrowly Intelligent Modules
3:20 - 4:00 Tooby, Goertzel, Yudkowsky & Legg panel: “Narrow and General Intelligence”
4:00 - 4:25 Break
4:25 - 4:55 David Hanson: Emotionally Intelligent Machines
5:00 - 5:30 Joseph Tsien: Deciphering Memory Code in the Brain
5:35 - 6:10 Irene Pepperberg: Nonhuman Intelligence: Where We Are and Where We’re Headed
6:15 - 7:00PM James Randi: Is There Such Thing as Scientific Consensus?
